McEwan thinks Obama can save the world

The distinguished novelist Ian McEwan (pictured) is convinced that Barack Obama can save the world. In Wednesday's Guardian he says it is within the power and ability of the “slender, handsome” new American President to cure the planet’s manifold environmental problems.

Obama, says McEwan, has more of an interest in science than any of his predecessors and he will come to power just at the right time. Or in McEwan’s lyrical assessment: “The hour may have summoned the man, but this happens to be a particularly difficult hour.” Obama’s aura, says the Booker Prize-winning novelist, “will be his empowerment, as numinous as good luck, as permanent as spring snow.

“As Barack Obama steps forward, the smoke machines and mirrors are packed away - or perhaps we can never, or should never, let them go,” suggests McEwan. “The question hangs in the air: is he merely the expert coiner of a stirring speech, or does he have the steel to turn intentions into results?”

And McEwan admits there are plenty who expect Obama to fail – “those who said during the campaign that Obama turned a fine speech, empty of intent, that he was, as they say in Texas, all hat and no cattle.”

The writer, who is currently working on a new novel, has high expectations that Obama will prove himself at a 2009 environment summit in Copenhagen, concluding: “He [Obama] must confound his detractors, start the detailed, practical preparation for Copenhagen, and refute them thus!”